So true. After 25 years in my career and looking at another 20 before I can even think about retiuring, I can say to youong people: do NOT buy into the "company loyalty" thing. Anyone who talks about 'deidcation" and:loyalty to a company only wants one thing: YOUR WORK FOR FREE. No company will ever feel any loyalty for you, that's for darn sure. That doesn't mean "be a slacker" or "don't do a good job". Be professional and do your job well. But never buy into the horse shit. Avoid being promoted to management like the plague. Far better to be paid less and do honest work than become an evil toady. If anyone uses he phrase "good work ethic", ignore everything else they say. Your life is yours, and anyone who tries totake soem of it from you without fair compensation is not your friend, and they myth of "work ethic" and "loyalty" are just concepts invented by slave masters to make the slaves work more without having to share more of the profits.

Suggesting that you switch to hourly is one tactic. I think the best one is to say to your noss "so, you want me to do extra work for you on my own time, for free? Ok, then - when are you coming over to mow my lawn? What's that? You don't spend your spare time doing free work for other people? How odd!""

Yup. They make us run faster and faster on the treadmill and produictivity skyrockets, but do we see any of the extra cash? No way, Jose. We're supposed to fall down on our knees and kiss the hands of the sockholders because they deign to allow us to still have ANY jobs. Who gives a damn oif peopel spend tehir lives in feature;ess cubes with crushed hopes and dreams? Gotta hit the projections The Street is forcasting or the stock might go down a half a percent! So skip that kid's soccer game! Put aside that novel you were writing! The stiockholers need vacation homes!

This. You are exactly right. It's funny how CEOs always whine about cost-cutting measures, the cost of labor, cost of health care, and so on. But you know what cost never gets cut? CEO salaries. Anything that benefits the bigwigs and the shareholders. It's always the workers who suffer.

And yes, rereading my post now I see I made some amusing typos. They are typographical errors, not errors in spelling, usage, or grammar. All they mean is that my fingers are klutzy and I never learned touch typing.

Quite well, actually. A degree in English is fifty times more useful than a degree in "business". At ANY job you can make the argument that effective communication skills are important. The world is filled with little preppiebots and jockbots that got "Business" degrees because they weren't smart enough for anything else or just couldn't decide. And now tons of people with business degrees work ffor me, the English major. Why? because I know how to coimmunicate effectively anmd not make basic errors of grammar, usage and spelling.

So mock away, dumbass. If I had kids I'd practically force them to get English degrees, or maybe philosophy or one of the sciences, economics, or sociology. Any of those things has interdisciplinary possibilities. If they metioned business degrees or MBAs I'd laugh them out of the house and say "pay for it yourself, then." The only degree more worthless than a business degree is Theatre, or possibly Art History.

"We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living."

- Buckminster Fuller "The New York Magazine Environmental Teach-In" by Elizabeth Barlow in New York Magazine (30 March 1970), p. 30

What burns me is that the right wing gets SO up in arms about taxes when it affects rich people. Try to raise a tax that affects people making millions and they scream like children. Try to close a loophole that helps some Goldman Sachs fund managers evade taxes and you better believe there will be a filibuster in congress.

But a tax that just affects average folks buying cameras and socks online? BIPARTISAN SUPPORT, BABY! TAX THOSE PLEBES!!! All of a sudden it's "Taxes? No problemo!"

When a boss asks me to work extra hours I say "As long as you're asking me to spend my presonal time working for you for free, will you come over and mow my lawn? No? So you want me to spend my free time working for you for nothing, but you aren't willing to do the same? That doesn't sound very fair to me."

Non-US readers should note that in the US there arte rarely actrual contracts between employer and employee. i sure wish there were! but for most employees there are no written agreements other than the companys "policy handbook" - i.e., The Book Of Rules. So we don't get to specify things like overtime pay (no salaried employees get it, by and large), on-call hours, or anything else. They give you a paycheck, and if you still want it, you do what they say. The company dictatates all the conditions, the employees just have to suck it up. "It's not a negotiaion."

Naturally there are some exceptions as you go up the ladder or in certain carreers, but for the vast majority that's how it is.

Military spending creates jobs. It's one of the few and most direct ways governments can do it. So they do it a lot. As I recall Spain is having an enemployment problem. Building submarines takes a lot of guys, form the guys who make the pipes to the guys who draw the blueprints, a nice spread of jobs from blue collar to high tech.

You supposed problems are easily solved. First, if you don't like poring over spreadsheets, then DON'T. Only idiot mix/maxers do that who give a shit whether their missisles do an extra 1.5342% damage or an extra 1.5368% damage. If you want to play the game, then play the game, and fuck spreadsheets. You don't need spreadsheets. You don't need fancy fitting programs, either. I've been having a blast playing the game forever (about 80 million skill points now) and I never, ever, even once, have used a spreadsheet. One only needs spreadhseets if one is has OCD. I can't express to you how little the super-high-end skills and weapons matter in the end. What matters is skill at PLAYING THE GAME. Someone good at startegy and tactics will win every time over someone who has.00032% extra damage or whatever. Being smart matters way more than massive skills or super-rare weapon drops. I've seen skilled players flying frigates with dead standard fittings decimate n00bs in tricked-out battle cruisers. In short, it's not your leets skills or your expensive equipment that matters, it's how well you play. Concentrate on that, not spreadsheets. Delete your spreadsheets and just PLAY. You'll have lots more fun.

If outfitting a battlecruiser for PvP is your goal and you haven't done it in six months, then you aren't allocating your training time right. You're probably trying to Max skills out so you can use the Sooper Dooper Navy Version Extra FooBar Cannon instead of the regular Foobar Cannon. Don't listen to the idiots who seem to imply that if you don't fly a ship into PvP with six billion ISK worth of gear that you're bound to lose. It's FAR smarter to fit a ship with everyday run of the mill gear and use it wisely. Plus, when (not if) you get it blown out from under you, no big deal, just get another cheap one.

And finally, if you fear that you're missing the "big stuff" because you're not in a big corp/alliance, then... JOIN a big corp/alliance. Pretty simple! It's lots of fun!